Of Airports & Single-Serving Friends: An Old College Essay

Before traveling, my first true love was writing. I love words, love the science of putting them together and the art of expressing yourself with them. Inspired by Throwback Thursday (that thing is all over Facebook), I was looking through posts on my old personal blog and found this - a paper I wrote for my Modern Lit class in college. We were tasked to write about any of the poems we had discussed in class, and I chose Yvor Winters' "At The San Francisco Airport", about a father who accompanies his daughter at the airport to see her off as she heads for college. I thought it would be interesting to write the daughter's point of view of the moment. I thought of my dad as I wrote it - he works away from home and I live away from home as well, so we are used to regular hello's and goodbye's. I like to think of goodbye's as see you next time's.

So anyway, I wrote about what I thought would be the girl's thoughts and realizations while on the flight, after bidding her dad goodbye. The coolest thing about this paper is that when I wrote it, I had never ridden a plane in my entire life. It's personally amusing to think that not so long ago, I was a little girl eager to see the world. Now I'm still a little girl, still eager to see the world, but thankfully, I have seen more of it. I hope to see even more of it as I get older.

This post is becoming incredibly cheesy. Read my college paper under the cut, if you dare, and remember that I wrote it in college - I was young and naive. I'd love to hear what you think!

Airport Daze & Other Drabbles (Laos Musings, Part 1)

Note: I've never actually kept a travel journal, and would only write about my travels after I got back from them. But the Laos trip was different - there was plenty of time to think and write, so I did: at the airport, the cafe, on a boat. I had meant to edit my little drabbles from the road and put them together in one neat post, but there's something more raw and real about reading through the actual words I wrote while I was on my trip, so the stuff you will read below is mostly unedited, and nearly exactly as I had written them on my laptop, my iTouch or my phone while traveling around Laos. 

Contrasting, 04 May 2012, NAIA 

I am sitting beside a man having a video call with his family. I gather that he’s bound for Singapore, most likely to go to work there. I can sense in the way he holds his phone in his two hands tightly, in his intent gaze on his wife and daughter on the screen, that the airport is the last place he’d want to be in at this moment, that he would do anything to come home and stay there. 

I, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to leave. 

There’s always a little tinge of guilt that taints my excitement to travel, right along that question that nags me more often than I would probably care to admit – why am I so eager to leave? Why so eager to go away? The guilt is especially tangible this time around, while sitting beside this man, who I’m sure feels exactly the way my dad does, because he too works away from home. 

The thing is, it’s not that I long to travel so I can escape – maybe I do, to escape the daily grind of everyday corporate life, but certainly not to escape home and the people I love in it. If anything, travelling makes me long for home, and how does that saying go again, about how distance makes the heart grow fonder? 

In a perfect world I would have a career that lets me frequently fly across the world on business-mixed-with-pleasure trips, a friend and family member in every corner of the globe and a home with every one of them, and the man beside me will be able to provide for his family in the comfort of his own country. 

But life is never quite as practical as the humans who live through them seem to be, or perhaps it’s practical in ways we are not always able to see. Doing something you love and doing something for the one you love can sadly mean two different things, and perhaps in those two is how we, the man beside me and I, are different.  

Airport Daze, 05 May 2012, LCCT 

I’ve had my fair share of flights in ungodly hours, of back-to-back, no-sleep flying from one destination to another, and this trip to Laos is no different. I left Manila in the evening on a Friday night, arrived past midnight the next day in Kuala Lumpur, and now have time to kill at the LCCT before my morning flight to Vientiane. I was wide awake at one point, but now everything feels a little surreal – it’s freezing inside the scarcely-populated terminal, the cold seeping through my jacket while it rains buckets outside. My eyes are threatening to fall shut, and it’s only the fast and free WiFi plus MGMT’s “Boogie Down” that’s keeping me up. 

Two Caucasian guys just sat a few rows across from mine, one holding a tiny green guitar (a banjo?), the other carrying a regular–sized one, and a book. I wonder what they’re doing so far away from home. 

I’m so sleepy that I don’t even long for a bed – just my seat on the plane so I can doze off even before takeoff. But it’ll still be a few minutes before boarding time, and Jen isn’t even around yet. 

Even with the lack of sleep however, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. This is the life – sitting sleepless in airports, amid strangers, with nothing but the thought of a strange new destination keeping you afloat.

Snapshots: Life in Airports, VIetnam

I'll be in and out of airports this week, and I know a lot of people loathe airports, but I quite like them. They open the gates to the rest of the world after all.

Snapshots: Moments at the Airport, NAIA 3, Manila, Philippines

I love airports - they hold the promise of an adventure, of a new place to discover and of new friends to meet, but they can also promise the warm, fuzzy familiarity of home. It just depends which way you're going.

Snapshots: A Rainy Day At The Airport

Summer in the Philippines is over and these past few weeks, I've been preoccupied with the rain, work, and moving in to my new place - which means I've been unable to blog about my trips. I'm back though, and to usher in the rainy season, I thought I'd put this picture up, from when we were waiting to board our plane in Coron, Palawan back to Manila last year. Surprisingly, it was one of the most comfortable, turbulence-free flights I've taken, but you never would've been able to tell from this picture.